Christine Quinn, the only major Democratic mayoral candidate to have skipped a press conference announcing plans for march along Fifth Avenue to "end" stop-and-frisk, will attend the June 17 event, according to a source with direct knowledge of the Council speaker's plan.

It's another illustration of Quinn's efforts to navigate between two plainly opposing sides on the issue without quite casting her lot with either of them.

Quinn has a nomination to win, meaning she can only allow so much daylight to open up between her and the other candidates on substantive issues that could be important to like Democratic primary voters.

On the other hand, Quinn enjoys a much closer relationship with the Bloomberg administration than any other candidate does, and is counting on winning at least tacit support from the mayor and his establishment allies as the continuity candidate.

And while she's now planning to attend the march on Fifth Avenue, which will undoubtedly feature lots of enthusiastically vented anti-Bloomberg sentiment, she's going to have to find a way to square the decision with the impossible-to-keep precedent she set recently by abruptly walking out of a press conference at City Hall when someone in the crowd referred to the mayor as "pharaoh Bloomberg".

The anti stop-and-frisk event she skipped this week was a big one, in a mayoral-primary context: attendees included the Rev. Al Sharpton, N.A.A.C.P. leader Ben Jealous, president of the United Federation of Teachers Michael Mulgrew and president George Gresham of the powerful healthcare workers union 1199SEIU. Quinn's competitors—Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, City Comptroller John Liu, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson—were all there.

"Don't think we can ever support anyone that wants to be int he leadership of New York City if they are not speaking out against this policy of stop-and-frisk," he said.

Later, when I asked what he thought of Quinn's advocacy of stop-and-frisk, Gresham said, "This is an issue that is deeply important to our community and I would just say that it could be better at this point."